Cabaret: Katrin Weber: A joke has to come out immediately

»Katrin Weber? A name you can never remember!” Leipzig cabaret artist and joke researcher Bernd-Lutz Lange is said to have exclaimed when he met her. Yes – this Wednesday the entertainer will be awarded the Berlin Cabaret Prize “Eddi”. And she performed with Lange for years. Likewise with Tom Pauls, who recommended them to Lange, as “Tom & Cherie”.

The “Eddi” was named after the left-wing cabaret legend Edgar Külow, who died in 2012 – by himself, because he awarded this prize in the GDR and was the first to receive it, in 1981. Among other things, the socialist motto comes from him: “Every day that you don’t rail against the government is a day wasted.”

Katrin Weber advocates the theory that when a joke comes to mind, it has to come out immediately – if it is suppressed, it causes physical harm. Everyone knows who wants to laugh and can’t. And yet she sang: “You and your stupid jokes, I would like to see you again.” But in one song she sang: “Please don’t say to me: I’m not your beer, please don’t talk to me like that.”

The always elegant and lively Katrin Weber, not to be confused with the Austrian jazz singer of the same name or with the rather dull “Frau Wäber” by the Baden comedian Hansy Vogt, says about herself: “I play and sing great operas – but with them Quotation marks”. And she creates these operas from the border area between Schlager and chanson.

She likes to appear as a diva from Vogtland, where she was born in 1963 as the daughter of a meat seller and an electrician and grew up in Plauen-Westend. “Do you still like Plauen today?” she asked Gregor Gysi in his talk show in the Tear Palace. Answer: “If I don’t have to live there, yes.” In 2022, at the 900th anniversary of Plauen, she said she had already been there at the 750th anniversary.

First she was a seamstress, an “assembly line jerk” in the textile factory, then she became a dancer and actress. And later a singer in musicals, on TV shows and at some point on cruises. Even though you see the same people morning, afternoon and evening for weeks. And everyone wants to tell you about their life.

Katrin Weber turned her into an autobiographical program and book: “You will laugh,” published in 2017. She sometimes appears as a diva on the wrong track, for example when she, as “Evita”, stalks through the bushes 20 meters from the stage at the open-air musical in Bad-Bentheim when she can’t find the path to the podium, brightly lit by the spotlight. Or when she falls into a hole in the middle of the stage during one of her first performances, like in a cartoon. Or wandering through the MDR studios because she confused the radio with the television.

“Sometimes you just have to be unlucky enough to be lucky,” she says, and then it becomes funny, the famous driving force of comedy and cartoons. Long live the misunderstanding! “Katrin Weber sings Agathe Bauer”, her version of “I got the power” from Snap!, a dance hit from the early 90s, is very funny. She said to Bernd-Lutz Lange when they met: “You don’t have to remember my name. You’ll notice when I’m near.”